Football writer Alex Keble celebrates the career of Gary Neville after the Manchester United and England defender was inducted into the Premier League Hall of Fame.
If Gary Neville is rarely eulogised as one of the Premier League’s greatest ever players, we can blame it on right-back being arguably the least fashionable position in football.
It’s the forgotten role and Neville the player, especially now that he stands so tall in the punditry world, risks being taken for granted, as is so often the way with dependable people.
And nobody was dependable quite like Neville.
Watch Neville's Premier League highlights
We can talk about his eight Premier League titles, his world-beating performances in Manchester United's 1999/2000 Treble-winning season, his clean-sheet record (fifth-best ever) and even his assist record (10th-highest among Premier League defenders), but there is no greater evidence of Neville’s brilliance than the very fact he was always there.
Sir Alex Ferguson relied unquestioningly on Neville to be his first-choice right-back for 12 years, during which time Man Utd won everything, beginning with one of English football’s most iconic stories.
The success of the "Class of '92" - the academy players who formed the basis of Ferguson’s dominant team of the 1990s - might be one of the greatest stories of the Premier League era.
Neville was one of its key pillars. Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and David Beckham were flashier, but Neville was always present, his position never up for debate, culminating in a club captaincy between 2005 and 2010 in which Man Utd won three Premier League titles and the UEFA Champions League.
He isn’t just a great Premier League right-back. He is the great Premier League right-back.
Watch Neville receive his medallion from Bryan Robson
Neville deservedly the first Hall of Fame right-back
Neville won the Premier League eight times between 1996 and 2009, ranking him third on the all-time list of winners behind Class of '92 team-mates Scholes (11) and Giggs (13).
He also won the UEFA Champions League twice, the FA Cup four times, the EFL Cup on three occasions and the FIFA Club World Cup in 2008.
All in all, Neville won 20 titles with Man Utd and was named in the PFA Team of the Year on five occasions.
Neville’s 602 appearances in all competitions for the Red Devils puts him fifth on Man Utd’s all-time list and third among those who played in the Premier League era.
Four hundred of those appearances were in the Premier League, which might only put him 46th on the competition’s all-time list but that’s because so many others bookended their careers with periods lower down the table.
Only three players - Scholes (499), Giggs (632) and John Terry (492) - sit higher in the appearance charts and can match Neville for games at a title-challenger.
Indeed, he is among the greatest one-club players in English football history.
Neville’s journey to the top a lesson in hard work
“Gary Neville pushed himself harder because he knew that he did not possess the natural talent of some of his team-mates,” wrote Ferguson in his third autobiography.
Rather than diminish Neville, that quote merely adds to his achievements. It’s one thing to dominate at the top of the industry with natural-born talent. To do it through sheer hard work and determination is inspirational.
Although surrounded by obvious superstars in the Class of '92, he emerged as their equal in terms of career honours.
He made his debut at the age of 17 in 1992, shortly after the FA Youth Cup final win that also featured Beckham, Scholes, Giggs and Nicky Butt.
Within a couple of years he was a regular starter, winning his first Premier League trophy in 1995/96 in a side that upset the odds by brushing off the infamous words of Match of the Day's Alan Hansen – “you can’t win anything with kids” – to storm to a League and FA Cup double.
From then on Neville was undroppable, forging formidable partnerships on the right side with players such as Jaap Stam and Rio Ferdinand, and helping United to repeat their success again and again as one of the team’s most vocal leaders on the pitch and in the dressing room.
Neville, third from right, joins other members of the Class of '92 to pose with the Champions League trophy after their 1999 success
Neville was a foil for Beckham and Ronaldo – and a great crosser
The defensive side of Neville’s game is more lauded (he ranks fifth on the all-time list of Premier League clean sheets, with 148), but anyone who survives for so long at the top needs more to their game than that.
Neville had right-back locked down through the early 1990s in the days of Steve Bruce, Lee Sharpe and Eric Cantona; through the Treble-winning season and a period of dominance; still throughout the wilderness years of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastian Veron; and then into the revitalised era of Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez.
We are quick to praise Ferguson for his tactical adaptation over the decades, yet we rarely do so for players. Neville is one of the few who have done it; an impossible feat without a serious attacking contribution to go alongside his defensive work.
Neville is 10th on the all-time Premier League list for assists by defenders, with 35, reflecting his perfection of the first-time cross on the overlap.
When you visualise Neville you think of that curling cross from the right, hit with the instep on the move as he shuttle-runs to overlap Beckham, and it says it all: clean and consistent; ready, as always, to attack the day.
It is another testament to an extraordinary career that for all eight of his Premier League titles, Neville was supporting either Beckham or Ronaldo, two of the greatest wingers in world football history.
You don’t get to do that unless you are the best of the best.